


Barriers

by En_Writes



Category: Barriers (album), Frank Iero and the Future Violents (Band), Original Work
Genre: Family Issues, Gen, stories about songs I guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28792119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/En_Writes/pseuds/En_Writes
Summary: A collection of stories inspired by 'Barriers' by Frank Iero and the Future Violents because that album basically made me feel a lot of things that kind of wanted to be written down. So, nothing fanfic-y, really. Each chapter is based on one song off the album.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. A New Day's Coming

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly can't recall the last time I was so nervous before posting anything. I honestly hope I don't fuck this up and maybe kind of manage to do those songs justice. I just really love that album a lot.  
> Huge thank you to [TheEbonHawk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheEbonHawk) for agreeing to beta this for me, that's probably the best thing that could have happened to this project. 
> 
> Since English isn't my mothertongue feel free to point out mistakes that might still have slipped into the text, but like, please be nice about it.
> 
> TWs/CWs might be added when more chapters are online.

You’ve always loved moments like this. You still do, even now.  
Despite everything, there’s still the tiniest spark of magic in those singular moments: the world is not quite asleep anymore and not quite awake yet, and you hope with everything you’ve got that these moments will never stop making you feel alive.  
Alive and breathing.  
Still kicking, despite everything.  
  
They bring back memories of walking home halfway across the city in the early hours of the morning, before the sun rises. They make you think of laughter, drunk on happiness (and drunken happiness as well, maybe). It reminds you of stumbling through the streets, for once not caring about anything but who’s beside you, feeling the life inside them, even without actual touch.  
Feeling a human connection that you don’t want to think about, because it would ruin the rush of falling in love with a stranger you might never see again and having them be the best damn thing in your life right then and there, which is all you need, really.  
  
And you swear, it’s not as pathetic as it sounds because there’s poetry in that, there absolutely is. It’s not yet written, it’s vague and unfinished, a fragment of a thought, but it still exists right then and there in this one magical moment, making everything else seem unimportant — and simply existing isn’t something that comes to you naturally, so you’ll take what you can get.  
So at that moment, there’s poetry in losing yourself in the reflection of neon lights on wet tarmac, in dancing in the middle of an empty street just because you can, and in kissing someone because at that second they’re exactly what you need to feel alive. Even whole, maybe, or something close to that.  
It’s proof that there’s something more to yourself, beneath the occasional bout of self-loathing and the restlessness of living in a city that will never be home.  
  
It’s the moments after the fireworks are over, when the smoke clears and the night quiets down. The small glimpses at a city that will never quite give in to sleep and refuses to admit that it needs the rest, despite everything it is or wants to be. And maybe that’s why you came here, because you and this city — you’re more alike than you both want to admit.  
  
It’s the walks on the freshly fallen snow that shushes this city, makes it listen for once, while you watch the streets around you quietly rise to consciousness in time with the sun rising in the sky. It startles you, sometimes, that all of this — even this city, maybe _especially_ this city — is beautiful. So much so that it almost makes you tear up on the way to work because you wonder whether you’re the only one alive enough to see it. And you hope and pray that you’re not because how could anyone not notice:  
  
Soft, cold light spilling over gray structures, making them come to life, making them sing out that  
  
_this is not a dead place, please, you have to remember, this is not the end._ W _e’re still here, please, don’t forget that you’re not lost and alone.  
  
  
_It is everything this place could ever be, everything you could ever be. And you cannot deny the way it makes you feel, because you have never been able to deny beauty anything. Even the messed up, graffiti-ed concrete beauty of this city.  
Or, again, maybe especially that kind, since beauty rarely equals perfection.  
  
It’s moments like these that make you believe, basking in the morning sun, that there has to be more than getting by. There has to be more, even if it’s just another stranger on the subway to fleetingly fall in love with or the way the trees lining your path home seem to sway in greeting. Familiar and warm even without you taking the time to linger in their shades.  
  
It’s always moments like these when you can’t help but smile, wide and open and endless like the sky, blue and crisscrossed by planes as it is. It’s these moments in which you can still feel that small spark of magic. You still feel that unspoken love between everything that exists in this world and deep inside it gives you hope.  
It gives you courage to do it all again. To go and get lost in the crowds, just another stranger stealing glimpses at their lives, going wherever the tides take you, hoping you’ll come out on the other side with a new story to tell and some love left in your heart.  
  
Because the world always needs more stories, whatever they might be. Stories shared between friends sitting in the grass on a river bank, faces turned towards the sun, caressed by the sweetest summer winds. Or resting between almost-strangers sharing mulled wine next to a campfire in the darkest night of the year, trying not to think of all the bad things that happened and will continue to happen, choosing to instead celebrate the light that is sure to come. Or reminiscing about all the things that we’re not proud of, but did anyways, human as we are.  
  
The world always needs more stories, and most of them are born from the little things that turn the ordinary into something special.  
  
Like the first sunlight of a new day cresting the roofs of a graying city and you being alive to witness it.


	2. Young and Doomed

People say your family will be there for you and protect you, no matter what, but that always felt like an oversimplification. Always made you wonder if those people ever actually met your family or if they just liked spewing platitudes to keep you from asking questions. Because you have experienced the opposite of protection so often, you can’t help but wonder if the people who still make you feel so unwanted are right, actually.  
Maybe you really aren’t that great to be around, and maybe it’s best if they leave you behind like everything else they don’t need anymore.  
Maybe your family was right, after all.  
Maybe there _is_ something deeply, profoundly wrong with you that needs to be dealt with before you’re fit for company.  
And then you ask yourself when exactly you got to the point where thinking about yourself as a burden became the new normal. When did _that_ become the new standard that you just can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try?

Sometimes you wonder what actually went through your parents’ heads when they decided to have you. You would honestly love to know what they expected when they were expecting, so to speak. But perhaps that’s just because even now, more than thirty years later, you still haven’t figured out what they wanted you to be or do. Which means that even now, you’re not really sure where the problem lies, which probably isn’t an ideal starting point for recovery, or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. On the other hand you have at least realized that there is a problem, and that it isn’t you. Or not _just_ you, at least. Still, you’re pretty sure that you will never understand why people want to bring other people into this world when they are so very clearly not equipped to deal with keeping them safe.

And you’re not saying your family are bad people, really, that’s not the point. It’s just that they were definitely too wrapped up in their own bullshit to notice their kid maybe wasn’t as okay as they had convinced themselves.  
You’re also saying that you’re definitely not the only one experiencing this, and maybe you just tend to gravitate towards people with similar life stories and all that, but holy shit did our parents’ generation fuck things up.

They’re leaving it to us to figure out how to get help and how to get better, and we’re trying, honestly, but the thing is, by now we’re all fully aware of how messed up we truly are. Damaged goods, the whole lot of us, but that just might be the reason why we fit together so well.  
Why we’re gravitating towards one another, like galaxies of mental health issues drifting towards the far end of the universe only to be swallowed in a supermassive black hole of _‘we don’t talk about that’_.  
But we know how to take care of each other, since we’re so acutely aware of the hurt of dismissal, of ignorance, of being made to feel like nothing we can do would be worth anyone's time. Our parents simply had too many important things to worry about to realize what was actually happening.

So we got used to that, too. We found our own ways of coping with the shit we had no way of understanding – because even _we_ figured that when your brain tells you to do fucked up stuff, something is probably wrong. But we held on as best as we could, and we have the trauma and the scars to fucking prove it.

Now we’re all grown up and still masters of self-sabotage to rival the generations that came before us. Come what may, we’ll always find a new way to fuck ourselves over in a truly spectacular fashion and even if we found success in what we do, we would have no idea how to handle it. We’re so deathly afraid of actually succeeding that we blindly repeat our parents’ mistakes, just minus the kids, probably.  
And it’s just not fucking fair to have to struggle through all of that by ourselves, to have to struggle _with_ ourselves like that, after doing our best to just survive our youth. We fought to get through school and all the bullshit that entails, just to get stranded in our twenties without a fucking clue about the future.

  
Turns out it’s pretty hard to make plans for your life when you never expected to make it past your third decade. Why would you plan ahead when you’re sure your brain will find a way to kill you sooner rather than later?  
And yet somehow the future still does come, and you’re just as fucking clueless as you ever were, still mad at the entire world. But at least now you understand yourself enough to see that maybe you should get help with all of this because you really _do_ want to live, self-sabotage be damned. And you want to do it on your own damn terms.  
You spent enough time trying to convince yourself that you’re not dead already, even if you felt like it, and you’re still so fucking far from okay that that doesn’t even matter - but fuck if you’ll let your parental issues mess with your life any more than they already did.

If they never managed to give you the care that you needed, then guess what, you’re your own parent now. And you may not have a spouse to drag down into all of this, but, shit, you have family that goes deeper than blood. And they understand you better than your actual relatives ever could, even if they tried for once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was suprisingly hard to write and harder to edit to get to a point where it's kind of where I wanted it to be. I'm super grateful to my beta for their help on this <3


End file.
